Why Europe Won’t Name Terrorists

Under pressure from Washington, Europe is finally edging toward calling one of the world’s leading terrorist organizations a … well, terrorist organization.

Yesterday Bulgaria’s foreign minister, Nikolay Mladenov, told European Union officials gathered in Brussels that his country has clear evidence of Hezbollah’s involvement in a deadly act of terrorism on European soil.

Mladenov summed up a months-long investigation into a bombing in Burgas, Bulgaria last July. Five Israeli tourists and a local driver were killed along with the Lebanese-born man who’d planted a bomb on a bus carrying vacationers from the Burgas airport to the Black Sea.

The Bulgarian report on the bombing, which was finalized last week, detailed how clues, including some found on the dead bomber’s body, led investigators to the terror attack’s planners — two Hezbollah operatives who apparently used Australian and Canadian ID in their travels around the continent.

“We in Europe need to take collective measures to make sure that such attacks will never happen again on EU soil,” Mladenov told his colleagues in Brussels .

But this being Europe, a reporter couldn’t resist asking the Bulgarian minister if his investigation was overly influenced by Israel and America.

Huh?

Hezbollah debuted on the world stage with the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, where 241 Americans perished. The attack also killed 58 French troops, yet France has since been a leader among Europeans in opposing the designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist group.